After hurling his latest grenade at Echo Entertainment’s chairman, James Packer hopped on his plane to a place that seems as far away from the seamy world of casinos as one can get.

At 6.15pm on Wednesday, Packer was hosting a cocktail reception at the 166-year-old Hong Kong Club with local banker and politician David Li Kwok-po and Malaysian banker Dato Sri Nazir Razak.

The old-world setting of the club’s Garden Lounge is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the flashing neon and marble of The Star casino in Sydney’s Pyrmont – the main battleground in the slanging match between the billionaire and Echo’s John Story.

Despite appearances, Packer hadn’t left his casino battle too far behind – the guests were gathered to celebrate the promotion of Deutsche Bank’s Rob Rankin and his move to London.

Rankin, a long-time friend of Packer’s, is up to his eyeballs in the Crown-Echo stoush as Deutsche is behind a controversial derivative structure that enabled Packer to emerge with a surprise 10 per cent stake in Echo on March 8.

After that first surprise, neither Packer nor Story have held back the vitriol.

Packer has accused Story of poor management and crimping shareholder returns – a theme he revisited on Wednesday when he publicly called to vote Story off the board and support the election of former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett as an independent non-executive director.

He has threatened to attack The Star’s dominance by opening a $1 billion, six-star hotel and high-roller casino at Sydney’s Barangaroo. It’s a project being treated with varying degrees of cynicism as Crown has yet to gain permission to split the monopoly casino licence held by Echo.

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Story has responded by claiming Packer is playing the “man not the ball" and is trying to get control of Echo on the cheap, while indulging in digs about Packer’s own failures – most notably the telco One.Tel.

“They are trying to make it a game of brinkmanship, a gun to the head," an Echo shareholder, who also holds Crown shares, says.

Those are just the opening salvos in a longer-term game for control of Echo – at the right price.

No one denies there are synergies in putting Crown and Echo together, a move that would see all the country’s major casinos controlled by one group.

The logic of a tie-up was speculated about well before Echo was spun off from Tabcorp Holdings in 2011. Perpetual Investments, the largest institutional shareholder in both Crown and Echo, is openly supportive of such a deal.

RBS Morgans analysts estimate there are synergies in the region of $20 million before tax – based on 2011 numbers. But more importantly, it’s the potential revenue gains by bolting together the separate high-roller businesses that excite investors the most.

Perhaps even more significant is that Crown faces its dominant market share being hurt if Echo succeeds in snaring even a little of the lucrative high-roller market with the $870 million overhaul of The Star – which is its final stages – and a resurgent VIP business.

Requisitioning an extraordinary general meeting so soon might be aggressive, but it shows that Crown doesn’t want to sit around and let Echo get runs on the board. And this way there’s a chance the share price gets knocked around a bit.

With just 10 per cent of the register, few expect Packer to be successful in deposing Story or getting Kennett elected, despite his undeniably strong record of nurturing Victoria’s tourism and events scene with Crown as the centrepiece.

CLSA analysts estimate that with its existing stake, Crown would probably achieve less than 20 per cent of the votes cast in an Echo EGM, based on the relatively low number of retail shareholders.

Simply, the analysts argue that institutions recognise giving away a board seat relinquishes control cheaply – a strategy that Kerry Stokes employed successfully at West Australian Newspapers. (As an aside, it’s worth noting that Stokes was touted among other buyers snapping up shares in Echo through broker JPMorgan. While Stokes was dismissed as a buyer, it does illustrate that there’s no certain outcome in this game, because of the number of moving parts and potential spoilers.)

Those close to Packer point out he has studied the Stokes play book with WAN as a guide to how he could go about gaining control of Echo without diluting his 48 per cent holding in Crown.

Even Packer can’t believe it’s as simple as sliding a non-executive director on the board and miraculously assuming control. The strategy has much more do with the constant application of pressure on both Echo and Story.

Giving the company away is something the institutions say they are not prepared to do, even those that hold stock in Crown and Echo.

Letting Crown in the door now would not only put a direct competitor on the Echo board but remove the logic for its competitor – and importantly its chairman – to pay up in a full takeover.

A shareholder stressed Crown’s need to protect its own earnings base, comparing Crown’s need to buy Echo and protect its own earnings as similar to Jupiters’ buying Treasury after Queensland granted another casino licence in Brisbane.

Another shareholder agreed:

“Echo have not had a superior product for some time. They’re now spending up and have a very good product," he said. “Sydney is a fantastic destination for high rollers and that’s what Packer is worried about. And he can’t compete – he hasn’t got a licence here."

While the logic of putting the two companies together is hard to refute, Packer has gone out of his way so far to tell institutions that a deal – cash, scrip, or a combination of both – is not on the agenda any time soon.

That’s hard to argue with, as Packer is yet to get approval to increase his shareholding in Echo above the legislated 10 per cent cap on any individual. Submissions to the NSW Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority closed on Monday.

It’s also unclear how Packer might fund a full takeover, particularly given the view that he is unwilling to dilute his 48 per cent shareholding in Crown with a capital raising or scrip deal.

While UBS has been appointed to find a buyer for the Consolidated Media Holdings stake, a deal which could fetch north of $1 billion if Packer gets his price, that may take some time.

Another area that is expected to be raked over in explaining why it would be difficult for Packer to launch a full takeover – or alternatively set up a rival Barangaroo casino, if the licence application proves successful – relates to the terms of Crown’s licence under the Victorian Casino Control Authority .

Among the undertakings Crown agreed to in 2005 were that whatever the company did outside Victoria would be in line with his objective to promote tourism in Victoria. Specifically, Packer agreed to “endeavour to maintain the Melbourne casino as the dominant commission-based player casino in Australia’’.

Echo’s board is due to meet today and shortly after that, will likely respond with its own statement refuting Packer’s claims.

With defence experts Flagstaff Partners on board, and the rebuttal lined up courtesy of Packer’s well-flagged war path, no one is expecting anything other than Story giving his unwelcome suitor both barrels.

The remaining unknowns include the appetite of the NSW government to go into bat for Packer and another casino in the city, and the Crown chairman’s patience to pursue a steady creep up Echo’s register should his bid to gain influence – not control – meet short shrift.

And then there is the biggest question of all – is the man now synonymous with the Australian casino industry prepared to stump up the cash in a full takeover.

Packer is unlikely to be troubled for now – time is very much on his side in a long-term game.